FinOpsFinOps / Cloud Cost Governance

AWS Cost Optimization

A production AWS account had grown to roughly $5,450 per month across 12+ services with no cost governance in place. 3 Dices ran a full cost audit, right-sized compute and storage, built a Reserved Instance plan, and cleaned up billing quirks, cutting the monthly bill by roughly half without touching reliability.

Monthly bill reduced by roughly half

~50%

Lower monthly bill

~60%

Cut from volume right-sizing

$13.6k

Annual RI savings identified

12+

Services audited

The challenge

A production account (~$5,450/month across 12+ services) had grown without cost governance: oversized volumes, idle resources, no reserved-capacity strategy, and DNS billing quirks.

No month-over-month cost visibility across a 12+ service estate
Oversized EBS volumes and idle resources billing every month
No Reserved Instance or commitment-discount strategy on steady-state RDS
Route 53 DNS billing inflated by CNAME records and NXDOMAIN charges
No budget alerts to catch cost drift early

Our solution

Cost Analysis & Visibility

Monthly cost analysis with month-over-month trending across 12+ services
Cost Explorer and Trusted Advisor review to surface idle and oversized resources
Budget alerts wired up so cost drift is caught early instead of at invoice time

Right-Sizing & Cleanup

Right-sized EC2 and RDS instances to actual utilization
Shrank EBS volumes (400GB → 60GB where safe), a process AWS does not natively support
Removed idle resources that were billing with no workload attached